Two Kinds of Prisioner
by HAL HARV and Watson
Summary: After a failed experiment, Wes & Reg fall into a coma, and it is very clear they may never return. Meanwhile, Q shows up human. The Q are going to destroy their universe. But now they're struggling for not just their universe, but that of every universe. Rated to be safe for later. Currently on hiatus.
1. Chapter 1 Wesley

_**This is the first in four stories I hope to write. Input is always appreciated. Enjoy!**_

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A long scaly tongue flicked over scaly lips, and the creature smiled sneeringly. Wesley Crusher swallowed his own saliva as he watched, the dryness of this lizard life-from making him thirsty. He wouldn't be here if he didn't absolutely need to be. His mother had taught him better than to hang around criminals.

His mother. If she found out what he was going to do… At the very least he would never be on a star ship again. And if she didn't get him, the law would. Exile would be his fate, as well as the loss of his Star Fleet rank and mining dilithium for the rest of his life.

But he didn't intend for her to find out, and if this all worked….. The possibilities were endless! But, unfortunately, the only reason no one had discovered it was the key component was illegal in the Federation. Extremely illegal. Thapoline. A dark silver liquid substance that burned the skin and was highly, highly combustible. And equally radioactive. Luckily, only five millimeters of the stuff was needed for his experiment, so it would be easy to hide.

Last month, he had contacted this ugly thing sitting across from him, Stuftl Rewvion, a master smuggler who dealt in the most illicit of the illicit, especially Thurgamention, a close cousin to Thapoline. But he needed Thapoline, nothing less, nothing more, so he had asked Rewvion to find some for him. Rumor said the Romulans were attempting to make use of it, so there had been a possible source all ready available. Rewvion had hinted it would be expensive, and Wes had been close to flat broke at the time. He had saved all he could earn, beg, borrow, or steal for this day, but now he was having second thoughts. Only the thought of what was to come for his peculiar field of experimentation made him sit still at the table in this dank and dirty bar across from this unscrupulous being.

"So. Boy wanted Thapoline. Stuftl have Thapoline," the thing rasped. It kept talking in the third person and referred to Wes as "boy." "Why boy want Thapoline?"

Its voice scratched Wes's eardrums and threatened to make him stand up right now and call it all off.

Wes smiled slightly. "Just a little experiment."

"Dangerous?"

The ensign shrugged. "I suppose."

He carefully brushed off his pants and suppressed a shudder. This bar on Risa didn't care in the least Wes was a minor and was frequented by smugglers, thieves, and thugs. Rewvion had requested they meet here; out of the way of the law and with a home field advantage. The place was poorly lit and looked like it had never been cleaned since it had opened at least two centuries ago. The bartender had offered Wes a drink when he had walked in, but he had ignored the being and took a seat with slippery Rewvion in the back.

"What experiment?"

"What business is it of yours? All you should care about is I need that ten cc's of Thapoline you have strapped to your hip for whatever reason."

"Ten cc's? Boy accuses Stuftl of not bringing ten milliliters?" Rewvion puffed up his spines and glared across the table. This human boy had crossed a sacred line; no one accused Stuftl Rewvion of lying.

Wes sighed. This creature was depressingly dull and slow-witted. "One cc is exactly equal to one milliliter."

"Stuftl sees. To business," he reached to the belt he wore and unclipped a vial filed to the brim with the dark silver of Thapoline. Wes noted the vial was made from transparent RadStop, a very new material that blocked radiation ten times better than lead. Rewvion put it on the table between himself and the Star fleet officer. Wes suppressed his excitement. It wasn't over yet.

"How much?"

"Purest Thapoline in Neutral Zone. Heavily guarded. Stuftl had to steal from secret military base."

Made sense. But because it was a secret base and the Romulans wouldn't want to admit they were experimenting with Thapoline, they wouldn't say anything.

"How much?"

Rewvion sat back with a shrug. "Ten thousand."

"Ten thousand credits? I don't have that kind of money. I only have five hundred. But," he leaned forward. "I **do** have this." He reached to his belt and pulled out a small weapon which he laid on the table. "A disruptor, and a very special one. This model has been branded illegal and destroyed. I took this from a collector who prized only the best. And original. Only three in left in existence, and two in Federation custody," he added quietly. This was the Varon-T Data had recovered from Kivas Fajo; he had managed to replicate it and had brought the replication with him. Couldn't let Rewvion have too many good toys.

Stuftl licked his lips again as he thought abut it. Tempting. Very tempting. If he found the right buyer, he could get at least two million. But he was very suspicious. One does not become a master of a dark trade by trusting every Federation agent that claimed to legitimately want an extremely dangerous substance.

"Boy desperate?"

"Let's put it this way; I need that Thapoline more than you can imagine. All I ask is you tell no one of our transaction, not even your most trusted associate, and I walk out of here with the Thapoline and you get your cash and the disruptor."

"How can Stuftl know he can trust boy?"

"Because Stuftl knows boy has come here alone and with no communicator. And how does he know he can't?"

"Very well."

Wes picked up the Thapoline vial after digging his five hundred from the duffle bag he had brought with him and handing the cash over. Stuftl gingerly picked up the disruptor and looked at it. Then he scooped the cash into an old sack stained with God knows what before dropping in the weapon.

Ensign Wesley Crusher stood up and walked from that horrible bar as he slid the Thapoline into his pocket, and he finally allowed himself a smile. Now to get back to Commander Ryker before he got worried. Then to get back to his work. He had been waiting a long time for Stuftl to come through with the Thapoline, and now he could continue his little experiment.


	2. Chapter 2 Reg

Meanwhile, Reginald Barcley was shimming down an emergency shoot somewhere behind Engineering. He felt vaguely irritated; Geordi had told him the console would be two corners ago, but it hadn't been. So one of them was wrong somewhere. Yet Reg had followed the directions to the letter, and Data had double checked what Geordi had said.

_There is something else at work here,_ that little voice piped up. It was that voice that made him stop and look at things in a different light for a new insight. He didn't hear it all that often, but when he did, it helped give him a boost of confidence by enabling his higher functions more room to maneuver, so to speak, often helping him easily overcome a vexing problem. It was that hyper-intelligence the Cytherians had given him not long ago. They claimed to have returned his mental capacities to what they had been originally, but they apparently had nowhere to put the extra, so they had buried it deep down and hid it where he couldn't find it consciously. Yet it hadn't totally worked; experiences would stir it up and occasionally bring it to the surface, enough for him to taken notice of it and even miss it when it was gone.

Reg stopped, sat cross-legged on the floor of the horizontal Jefferies tube, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. He readied himself, than did something he had only done two times before; he plunged into the depths of his mind. He shut out all sensory input and "looked" around this first level of consciousness before making another decision. There was someone talking in his ear, but he ignored it: he needed every ounce of concentration. Reg breathed even through his mouth for more oxygen and willed his fluttering heart to settle. He took a deeper plunge accompanied by a short gasp, and he searched his conscious again. Still nothing. Must be further down. Fear shot through him when he realized the inevitable; he would have to go deeper. He had never attempted such a jump before, but there was a first time for everything. Someone was still talking to him, but he continued to ignore it.

Reg summoned up all his courage and made the leap.

He had almost left the conscious realm behind now, but he was still aware of his breath coming in razor sharp, short pants now, and his heart slamming up against his ribs in his chest. But he didn't care.

He had found what he had been looking for.

There it was, a glowing something right on the border between the mind's day and night: the conscious and unconscious. He "leaned" down for it, and he warned himself to be careful. Any misstep could send him into that blackness, and all of his work in this little excursion would be for nothing.

He almost had it in his hand. Just a little further… He leaned another few centimeters, and his fingers brushed its surface. It sent shocks and sparks up his arm.

That must have been what loosened his concentration.

He fell into his unconsciousness' benevolent embrace, and his last thought was completely focused on what those precious few sparks and shocks had taught him. There was something else going on here for sure…

"La Forge to Barclay." No answer. "Reg?" Still no answer. "Reg? Are you there?" Geordi felt himself already assuming the worst. He had an overactive imagination and often invented grisly demises for crewmembers he was unable to contact. Often his morbid endings of their lives didn't come true and the communications silence was due to a mechanical failure, but those tendencies had saved the _Enterprise_ more than once.

He heard Reg gasp, and he attempted to get the engineer to say something, anything. But even when he pulled rank, there was no answer. Then he heard Reg start panting like he couldn't get enough air in his lungs.

Geordi hit the panic button. Reg sounded like he was suffocating. He didn't dare cut off the channel, so he turned to Data. "Have O'Brian get Barclay out of there!"

"Data to O'Brian. Beam Lt. Barclay out of the Jefferies tube."

"_Yes sir."_

Reg was still panting, and Geordi said tensely, "O'Brian!"

"_I can't get a lock on him, sir. There is some sort of interference."_

Interference? How? And of what kind? It was clear Data was already on the problem: his eyes lost focus, and his "breathing" slowed.

There was a dull _thud_ over the channel to Reg, and Geordi felt something snap. "O'BRIAN!"

"_I have him. Materializing now."_

Geordi breathed a sigh of relief and was about to snap Data from his reverie to close the channel when O'Brian suddenly came back on.

"_I'm beaming him to Sickbay. He's out cold._"

And Geordi felt a clammy hand grip his chest.


	3. Chapter 3 Q

"You can't do this!" Q hissed. Q1 didn't say anything, so Q continued his rant.

"Do you have any idea what this would mean? The End is coming, but do we have the right to do this?"

"Are you troubling us with morals?" Q' asked.

"I most certainly am! There is no amount of damage control that can be done to keep it stable! And we have no right! We are protectors, not destroyers!" Rage boiled fiercely inside him, and there was no word in all of the mortal languages that could describe it. Q was the only language that could possibly contain the all-consuming dangerously hot fire that threatened to spill out from all cracks of his being to contaminate the rest of the Continuum.

The members of the Council of Q were already starting to ignore him, and the internal inferno kicked up a notch. Was he the only one in possession of actual thought?

"I'm not going to stand by and watch this!" He declared.

"Oh? And just what can you do?" Q2 scoffed.

Q fixed him with a thought brimming with the blue fire, and replied, "Enough." He readied to leave, but Q1 stopped him.

"If you leave right now, we will strip you of your powers."

Q didn't even relax. "I would prefer to be human than Q at this point."

"Very well," Q' said. He contrived a single thought, and Q had only a split second to find a way to retain all of his knowledge. With the last drop of his powers, he summoned up isolinear chips and transferred everything over to them. He would need every bit of it, and there was not enough storage space in the human brain to contain it all.

Q only had to think where he wanted to go to silently ask the Council to send him and his chips there. Q1 agreed to grant Q his one request, and Q found himself standing naked on Risa in front of a very confused Wesley Crusher.

"Interesting character he is," Q' said.

"Very," Q1 agreed.

"Should we stop him?" Q2 asked.

Q1 replied, "No. Let's see what he will do."

"Q, I cannot tolerate this!" Picard declared.

"It doesn't surprise me, Captain." The now-human being set his rather large bag of isolinear chips on the table. "If you want proof, just look at chip 397."

Picard rolled his eyes. "There is no need for that. Why are you here?"

"To warn you, and to help you."

"Warn me?" Picard asked doubtfully.

"Yes, warn you. The Q are going to terminate your Timeline."

Picard sighed. The Q jargon made that sentence almost meaningless. "Timeline?"

Q didn't falter. "The space-time in which you live, move, and have your being. Your universe. But you lack a Temporalist, so it serves as the means to the End." He said it like it was obvious. If the idea that he should avoid the jargon had occurred to him, he had decided against it. Nor did it help he was jumping ahead of himself. Q stopped. "I'm ahead of myself, aren't I?"

Picard didn't trust himself to speak, so he nodded.

"A Temoporalist is the regulating factor in the Timeline. He does… cleanup. Every Timeline has one, except, by some fluke, you. This makes your Timeline particularly prone to damage, and it is already frayed, to use low-level terminology. The End will pull on this frayed thread and unravel the whole tapestry. Everything is so interdependent."

"And the Q are going to do its job for it?" Picard asked.

"Not exactly." Q planted his palms on the desk and leaned forward toward him. "They think cutting out the thread will stop the unraveling." His eyes reflected his fury. Bitterly, he added, "They think they can do damage control. They have no idea."

"Why not?"

Q shrugged. "I don't know. They should. But the point is they don't."

Picard sighed. Q expected his help, but he was still very much in the dark. "How would they manage it? Even the Q must not have the willpower to use snap us out of existence."

"They don't. They have a far subtler trick." He straightened and walked toward the window. "They're going to kill your Keeper before Succession. Without that, it will be far too easy for even one of us to fray the Timeline enough for it to fall out of place on its own."

Picard had never seen Q so somber and dark. He was intense, and his eyes searched him with a fine-toothed comb as he turned back to face him.

"And what did you hope to expect by telling me this?"

Q didn't answer right away. "I brought my complaints about it to the Council of Q, and they banished me for it. I'm human, just like you. I came here to offer my services as a guide. I know where your Keeper is. You have to make it to him first, or you will not see next week."

Picard didn't even have to think about it. Q had come to him for this important task, and he wasn't just forcing him into it like he usually did. "Alright."

Q smiled bitterly. "Maybe we'll beat the Q at their own game after all. Buckle up. It's going to be a hell of a ride."


	4. Chapter 4 The Experiment

_**I know it's been a while since I updated. Sorry! I've had a lot to do. Feel free to pester me, and in all honesty, it would help me update sooner.**_

Geordi's face came into fuzzy focus, and a few blinks cleared the picture up until there was no doubt it was Geordi looking down at him. The chief engineer sighed in relief and wiped sweat from his dark forehead.

"He's alive."

"I do not understand. Lt. Barclay was alive the whole time."

Data was here then, too.

"Yes, Data, but he wasn't conscious, and Geordi was very worried."

Dr. Crusher too? Well… It made sense, in a convoluted sort of way.

"Geordi… Geordi… Th-The…"

"Hush," La Forge cut off sternly. "You've just come round."

"You'll be fine, but you should relax and take time to recover," Crusher stepped in.

She was probably right. But he was buzzing with energy as the full force of returning to sense hit in, and the enlightenment from his journey was still swirling and was stirring, exciting his locked-away hyper-intelligence. It pounded on the bars to its cage and cried for freedom, but he didn't have the mental strength to destroy the barrier between him and it. And he knew it. So he was content with what he had.

He sat up suddenly, and Geordi grabbed him by the shoulders. "Time shift," he blurted out before Geordi could reprimand him.

"What?" Geordi asked.

"Time shift. That's why I couldn't find the panel. It was exactly right where you and Mr. Data said it would be, in space. It's behind or ahead of us in time, probably moving proportionally to us, so we won't catch up or outrun it."

Geordi frowned. It made total sense. To Reg, anyway.

"How would such a time shift occur?"

"I'm not sure. I can get right on it. If you will let me have Commander Data, I can probably find the cause in less than a day."

La Forge blinked beneath his VISOR and recoiled slightly. The last time he had heard Reg talk like this was when the Argus Array had given out some time ago. What had happened? Certainly more than Reg was telling. Maybe he had somehow crossed the figurative Koch Boundary again: Reg had reopened his mind to the heavenly functions, thought processes higher than those usually attained. Not only that, but there was a huge amount of energy behind his voice. He plainly wasn't going to rest any more.

"I can't give you Data, sorry," Geordi said.

"And I still want you under observation for the next 48 hours," Beverly said. "You can work, but I want you here in Sickbay."

"Very well."

Reg sat upright and hopped off the bed. He made a beeline for the nearest consol and touched in a few commands. He needed readings of the spot for the next few hours, and he punched in a program to monitor where the panel was.

He had a lot of work to do.

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48 hours later, Reg was sure he had figured it out. Excited, he ran to go find Dr. Crusher to ask for his immediate release.

"I suppose it has been the 48 hours," she relented.

"Thank you, Doctor." He turned and hurried out of Sickbay. He knew where he had to go. Racing down the corridors, he came to the Jefferies opening that would change his life.

Squirming his way through the tight confines, he reached the spot where the panel was. If he was right, then there would be residual energy around here. Scanning his tricorder around the area, he smiled as the readings came up. He was right. The question now was if he could somehow undo this.

He tried to worm his way a touch closer, lost his balance, and fell forward. Throwing his hand out, he caught himself, right where the panel was supposed to be.

Meanwhile, right at that moment, Wesley Crusher slid his vial of Thapoline into its rightful place on his little machine, and a shock went through the whole system, engulfing both Reg and Wes.

They both fell into blackness.


	5. Chapter 5 Gary

_**Sorry it's been so long. I had NaNoWriMo, and I'm having some trouble as to where to take this. But, Enjoy!**_

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The night was, as ever, dark and moonless. Only the stars broke through the black soup created with the Big Bang itself. A breath of wind rattled the trees and the brush of the forest. It was a forest designed and built for them, the only humans on the planet. It was on the only piece of solid land, which had been artificially created. The rest of this little world was in the seas that covered the surface, on the rocky bottom, where their Assigners had lived for so long. The icy water was in shades of blue and green, and the Assigners themselves were silver-skinned and beautiful by Earth standards. They were a brilliant, loving species who were recognized by the Guardians as the most advanced life in the universe. It was a tremendous honor to know how the Guardians themselves almost humbled themselves to the Assigners.

Supervisor 347, or as he was called on Earth, Gary Seven, was taking a walk along the edge of the Forest when he heard a splashing. He looked out toward it's source, and an Assigner flipped up out of the water onto the land. Seven knew this one by sight and name-Saka, the Assigner he had the most contact with.

"We may have a problem," Saka started in English. "Come with me. We must go to the Capitol."

Seven nodded. Saka had not wasted time with formalities; he understood. He stripped down and waded out into the chilly water. Saka followed and took him by the wrist. His fingers barely wrapped all the way, and Seven took Saka's wrist just to be sure. They reached the edge of the shelf, and they dove straight down. Far down below through the water, the Capitol glowed, lighting their way. Down and down they swam, Saka pulling Seven along-even with his considerable strength, Seven was no match for an Assigner in the sea. Seven was running out of air, but still down they went. The Capitol looked close enough for him to touch now, and Saka pulled him down right into the heart of the glowing metropolis. The Council building was right in the center of the city, the bulls eye of a target of concentric circles. They went inside, and Saka quickly found the air tanks for Seven. It was not often the Agents got to come down, but there were plenty of amenities for when they did.

Seven bit down on the regulator and took a much-needed breath. This was one of the vapor tanks, but he could have equally used the liquid one. It would give him more time, so he considered switching but decided against it and slung it onto his back. This was a pressing matter.

Saka led him into the Council chamber, where the Council was already present. They were in an uproar. A Guardian was there sitting in the center, and he didn't even look in their direction when they entered.

Seeing Seven present, one of the Council members came up to whisper what was going on. The Guardians had forsaken their sacred duty and were planning to destroy a whole Timeline.

"Take whatever measures you see fit to protect this universe," Saka said. "We heard there is a Guardian made human. We have found him. You will go and assist him."

Seven nodded.

"You may be interested to know he's on the Enterpise-D," Saka said, evoking Seven's short roller-coaster time in Earth's past when he met and interacted with Captain Krik and his officers. "You must go. We do not have much time." Saka handed him the little card with the coordinates. Seven nodded and headed out.

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Miles O'Brien and Geordi La Forge were running routine maintenance on the transporter, when it suddenly kicked them out of the system and hummed to life. Disturbed and hoping this would just be something they had done, they watched, and they waited.

But fate hated them, and so an unknown form formed on the padd.


End file.
